After careful analysis of the market, Activision Blizzard found that Call of Duty: Ghosts is selling way below expectations for one simple and clear reason: "the challenges of the console transition year."
The 11th title in the series with the same basic gameplay elements, Ghosts has been ill received by critics who got bored of rehashing the same old formula every year. Nonetheless Activision's CEO, Eric Hirshberg, is adamant that low review scores have nothing to do with the game's (relatively) poor market performance.
"The critical response doesn't always mirror the fans' appreciation of a game," he argued. "We actually do read the critics' comments and take them into consideration during our creative process, but we just can't measure ourselves by that yardstick alone."
Basically, Activision believes that the fact that Ghosts has low review scores AND low sales numbers has nothing to do with the game's quality or the franchise's freshness. One has to wonder, how the console transition hurt Ghosts sales given that it is available on all consoles of both generations and PC.